FRONT

Showcasing Emerging Talent: CLICK 06!

I have been kindly asked to help out on the judging panel for YCN’s Click 06 (sponsored by Getty Images), an initiative to showcase and reward the best emerging creative talent in digital and interactive communication. This year 10 new creatives have made the shortlist - covering the UK, USA and Brazil.

This sort of thing is great exposure for talented people with interesting ideas - so head on over there and show your support.

Designers Have No Sense of Humor

Many designers know that they have arrived at the far-reaches of geekyness when they find typography jokes funny (A font walks into a bar, and the bartender says, “We don’t serve your type here.”). It must be the mixture of long hours, paper sniffing or sitting too close to the computer screen that begins to skew our judgement.

It is for this reason that the upcoming ‘Kern Up The Volume!’ typography and design lecture gets FRONT’s full support. Not only because of the clever typographical pun in it’s title - but because one of the world’s most respected living typographers Erik Speikermann will be speaking.

It should be a good seminar, take our word for it… we’re a good judge of character [sigh].
See you there!

A Nice Spin on Community Websites

Seems that community interaction online is growing rapidly. Two nice examples are Elan Snowboards and Wee World.

Elan Snowboards helps promote it’s products by building an active community through the website. The community is made up of both the public and pro snowboarders who use Elan’s product. I think most snowboarders would find this website engaging, whether or not they own an Elan snowboard.

Wee World is another online community based around the idea that you can create an Avatar of yourself and interact with other site users. The cartoonish avatar design process is a simple and absorbing way to attract users who then become part of the community. You can even create an avatar for MSN, myspace, skype, xanga.com or blog if you like. Here’s my attempt…

Tandem Website Launched

We have recently completed an online portfolio for Holywood-based design firm Tandem Design. Tandem were keen to develop something with an experimental interface in order to promote discovery within their portfolio, while not alienating the average user. We found working on the website a good challenge and are interested in seeing just how users will react to it’s irregular navigation. Let us know if you like it!

Tools: Vim

Hey there. I’ve been asked by my supreme ruler to write something for this weblog. So technically I’m now being paid to write for a weblog, and they said it would take talent for that (in your face “Dooce”:http://www.dooce.com, “Kottke”:http://www.kottke.org and “Gruber”:http://daringfireball.net/).

So, I rumbled about a little in my branes and came up with this, talk about the stuff I use to do my job, maybe someone else in here will do the same. The developers need me a lot to do their job so maybe they’ll have a post entitled “Tools: Stephen”.

Onward. “Vim”:http://www.vim.org/ is Vi improved (that’s all the history you’re getting, feel free to read about it on the Vim website though), a text editor to beat all, a tool of precision and consequently steep learning curve. This is likely to bore most of you rigid, there’s no fancy Flash/JavaScript flashing bells here, sorry.

With Vim, finding stuff is easy:

/monkeys

Simple, takes you to the first occurence of start of the string ‘monkeys’ in the current file. Hit ‘n’ to go the next occurence and ‘N’ to the previous.

/monkeys/e

Takes you to the end of the first occurence of the string ‘monkeys’, add /e+n to take you to the end of match plus n. adding /s+n instead does the same but at start of string.

Replacing stuff is easy too:

:s/monkeys/peanuts/

...replaces the first occurence of the word ‘monkeys’ with ‘peanuts’ on the current line

:s/monkeys/peanuts/g

...replaces all occurences of ‘monkeys’ on the current line with ‘peanuts’

:%s/monkeys/peanuts/g

...replaces all ‘monkeys’ with ‘peanuts’ in the file.

I could go on, and on, and on, and on. You can do these simple things on many files at once and you can do many more complex things with regular expressions, in fact you can do all sorts of great text editor things and you can do them quickly on Windows (GVim), Mac or Unix. *Vim rocks!*

vim -c ":%s%s*%Zru)unzrfvgr[terra.pnevfraqn.pbz%|:%s)[[()])-)Ig|norm Vg?"

Is The Web Really Is In It’s Puberty?

It’s 15 years since Tim Berners-Lee published his WorldWideWeb Summary, giving a name to the web as we now know it. The Flash player and associated technology is also 10 years old today.

On one hand, web designers such as ourselves feel privileged to have been immersed in the exciting WWW and it’s ever-changing landscape for so long. On the other hand - it’s amazing that a phenomenon such as the internet has moved so quickly, completely changed modern life as we know it in much less than a generation.

So I guess that means that the Web is in that awkward ‘starting to kiss girls’ phase and sooner or later someone is going to have to have the ‘sex talk’. You would think so. But the web is really moving at such a pace that it is already starting to mature and according to some evangelists (such as Jacob Nielsen) is actually becoming more like the communication tool it was originally planned to be.

According to some of the people who were there in the beginning, the internet was intended as a force for good - to help doctors and scientists around the world swap notes and theories on best practice and new procedures, or to help people find missing family or relatives. But once the potential for exploiting the web was realised (through advertising, security loopholes and sexual desire) it could be said the sweet and innocent WWW experienced something of a rebellion and started hanging out with the wrong crowd, staying out late, getting drunk and even catching diseases.

So if the web really has had a ‘coming of age’, what evidence do we have of this new found responsibility? I suppose it could be argued that since the explosion of the web into the common household, the majority of people using this technology have begun to get over their giddy phase and are starting to go online as part of everyday life. Whether booking flights to see loved ones, ordering shopping from Tescos or checking the price of a laptop in PC World before popping into the high street branch to haggle with the 16 year old sales assistant.

Business, also it seems, has woken up to the benefits of online potential and what an intelligent, well executed web presence can achieve. In the late 90’s and early 2000’s the business world experienced a mixture of mass panic and mass abandonment (or stupidity - depending on your point of view) by spending large sums of money just to ‘be on the web’ (don’t believe me?) - as if that was enough to guarantee prosperity. Now however, the business of marketing on the web is a business in itself, and companies such as HP, Orange and Honda are making the most of that opportunity by ensuring that what they do online is benefiting the consumer too - making everyone happy.

So what happens next? As ever we will just have to wait and see. One thing’s for sure - with the recent surge in online community websites and user generated content, I don’t think the WWW is going to be settling down any time soon and moving to the county for a spot of tea on the lawn and bird watching. Do you?

Inspirational Speakers Required - Apply Within

FRONT - in conjunction with the Belfast Festival at Queen’s - will be running a series of seminars and workshops in Belfast from January to June 07 (roughly). We want to raise the bar locally by reminding ourselves and others around us of the great work that goes on around the world. The web should be a happy place and it would be nice to lift our eyes from the day to day by getting some inspiration from those who have been there and shown us all the way.

So, if you’re interested in speaking, or you’d like to suggest someone we could invite, feel free to post a comment and let us know what you think. Who would you love to hear speak?

Because we’re organising this together with the Festival and QUB, funds are limited - so there’s no honorarium (fee) for speakers I’m afraid, but we can sort travel expenses and organise dinner and some nice accommodation :-)